Stefanelo Botarga and Pickelhering: Fishy Italian and English Stage Clowns in Spain and Germany

Fish represent one of the most significant of several shared themes in the stage names chosen by early modern Italian and English travelling players. The most celebrated fishy stage name of the commedia dell’arte, Stefanelo Botarga, refers to a mediterranean seafood speciality; Pickelherring, the most popular English stage clown in the early modern German-speaking regions, took his name from North Sea pickled herring. The impetus for these stage names clearly came neither directly nor solely from the fish itself. Rather than simply reflecting vague late medieval pan-European links between foolery and carnivalesque foods, early modern fishy stage names complicate culinary connotations with darker and more recent ethnographical and religious associations. Focusing on some of these associations, this paper suggests that the choice of fish featured in stage names reflected regional considerations of the players’ home and host nations, and that transnational perspectives are relevant to their understanding at many levels

Issues in Review: New Developments in Commedia Research: The Commedia dell'Arte: New Perspectives and New Documents

Introduction to "Issues in Review: New developments in commedia research", 141-240, guest editor M A Katritzky. The first of six articles in this section, it introduces the five further articles, by Maria Ines Aliverti (158-180), Rosalind Kerr (181-197), Erith Jaffe-Berg (198-211), Stefano Mengarelli (156-7 & 212-226) and Robert Henke (227-240) and reviews recent significant developments and publications in the field of commedia dell'arte studies

Improvisation in the arts of the middle ages and renaissance

Abstract not available

English troupes in early modern Germany: the women

About the book: Emphasizing a performative and stage-centered approach, this book considers early modern European theater as an international phenomenon. Early modern theater was remarkable both in the ways that it represented material and symbolic exchanges across political, linguistic, and cultural borders (both "national" and "regional") but also in the ways that it enacted them. Contributors study various modalities of exchange, including the material and causal influence of one theater upon another, as in the case of actors traveling beyond their own regional boundaries; generalized and systemic influence, such as the diffused effect of Italian comedy on English drama; the transmission of theoretical and ethical ideas about the theater by humanist vehicles; the implicit dialogue and exchange generated by actors playing "foreign" roles; and polyglot linguistic resonances that evoke circum-Mediterranean "cultural geographies." In analyzing theater as a medium of dialogic communication, the volume emphasizes cultural relationships of exchange and reciprocity more than unilateral encounters of hegemony and domination

A wonderfull monster borne in Germany’: hairy girls in medieval and early modern German book, court and performance culture

Human hirsuteness, or pathological hair growth, can be symptomatic of various conditions, including genetic mutation or inheritance, and some cancers and hormonal disturbances. Modern investigations into hirsuteness were initiated by nineteenth-century German physicians. Most early modern European cases of hypertrichosis (genetically determined all-over body and facial hair) involve German-speaking parentage or patronage, and are documented in German print culture. Through the Wild Man tradition, modern historians routinely link early modern reception of historical hypertrichosis cases to issues of ethnicity without, however, recognising early modern awareness of links between temporary hirsuteness and the pathological nexus of starvation and anorexia. Here, four cases of hirsute females are reconsidered with reference to this medical perspective, and to texts and images uncovered by my current research at the Herzog August Library and German archives. One concerns an Italian girl taken to Prague in 1355 by the Holy Roman Empress, Anna von Schweidnitz. Another focuses on Madeleine and Antonietta Gonzalez, daughters of the ‘Wild Man’ of Tenerife, documented at German courts in the 1580s. The third and fourth cases consider the medieval bearded Sankt Kümmernis (also known as St Wilgefortis or St Uncumber), and the seventeenth-century Bavarian fairground performer Barbara Urslerin

William Hogarth (1697–1764) and book illustration I: <i>Hudibras, Quixote</i> and the Littlecote House murals

This article progresses long-term researches on Hogarth and book history, the iconography of the skimmington and transnational receptions of Don Quixote, by introducing a substantial new group of images potentially illuminating Hogarth's lost activities as a young painter, before he turned 30 in 1727. Astoundingly, no previous research-based study of them exists. Unknown to Hogarth specialists and dismissed by art historians, they are in the painted room at Littlecote House. Within a complex decorative scheme broadly referencing themes of human folly and the cabinet of curiosities, two walls feature floor to ceiling composite murals uniting numerous episodes from the publications most significant for Hogarth's early career as a book illustrator: Cervantes' Don Quixote and its most successful English derivation, Samuel Butler's Hudibras. Butler's book-length poem is exceptionally significant: Book-historically for its key role in copyright legislation and eighteenth-century British book illustration; arthistorically for its central role in the early career of Hogarth, who published two sets of engravings illustrating Hudibras in 1726. Local historians attribute the Littlecote murals to unidentified amateur Dutch painters, working in the 1660s (when Hudibras was first published). Archive-based evidence first presented here confirms their dating not to the 1660s but the 1720s and supports Hogarth's presence at Littlecote House around 1724. This work is heavily indebted to the exemplary scholarship of two landmark publications of 2016, Elizabeth Einberg's authoritative catalogue of Hogarth's paintings (all post-1726) and Peter Black's ground- -breaking exploration of Hogarth and house decoration. I here re-visit Hogarth's early practice of book illustration and house decoration with reference to a canon of pre-1800 Hudibras images, newly enlarged by situating the substantial Littlecote Hudibras mural within this context and its associated visual, literary and book historical traditions. With reference to the new images and evidence first presented here, I ask: Is Littlecote's painted room a rightly neglected pastiche? Or does it deserve closer scholarly attention? Perhaps even as an exceptional unrecognized British art treasure? Should Hogarth specialists now evaluate an entirely new possibility: whether the challenging pre-1727 gap in Hogarth's early career as a painter can be addressed by identifying his earliest paintings at Littlecote House? I must confess, I have but little hopes of having a favourable attention given to my design in general, by those who have already had a more fashionable introduction into the mysteries of the arts of painting, and sculpture. Much less do I expect, or in truth desire, the countenance of that set of people, who have an interest in exploding any kind of doctrine, that may teach us to see with our own eyes

Indole Synthesis Using Silver Catalysis

Indoles are amongst the most important class of heteroaromatics in organic chemistry, being commonly found in biologically active natural products and therapeutically useful compounds. The synthesis of indoles is therefore important and several methods for their synthesis that make use of silver(I) catalysts and reagents have been developed in recent years. This Focus Review contains, to the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive coverage of silver-mediated indole forming reactions since the first reaction of this type was reported in 2004

Quantitative Structure–Property Relationship Studies on Ostwald Solubility and Partition Coefficients of Organic Solutes in Ionic Liquids

Article discussing quantitative structure-property relationship studies on Ostwald solubility and partition coefficients of organic solutes in ionic liquids

1-Chloro-2-methyl-3-nitro­benzene

In the title compound, C7H6ClNO2, the chloro, methyl and nitro substituents are situated next to each other in this order on the benzene ring, with the mean plane of the nitro group twisted away from the mean plane of the benzene ring by 38.81 (5)°